[DG: Teaching & Learning] [Building Sakai] Fwd: SCORM in Sakai

Wed Aug 25 03:18:51 PDT 2010

Hi Charles,

I noticed your Lesson Builder tool on Confluence. The last couple of months we have spent building something quite similar. Our tool allows you to define a simple sequence of activities. From each activity you can link to resources or tools (eg Mneme, Assignments etc). Also students can mark activities as completed as the progress through the sequence. The advantage of these tools over SCORM is the integration with other Sakai tools I think. As far as I know this is not possible with SCORM. We have been looking at IMS Learning Design in the past to solve this use case but the uptake of that spec. appears to be very slow.

We hope to put our tool in to contrib soon. We just need to clean out some dependencies on some other projects of ours that are very LOI specific.

Cheers

Mark

LOI

Mark Breuker
Senior Informatie Analist
Tel.: +31 71 5451 203
Leidse Onderwijsinstellingen bv
Leidsedreef 2
2352 BA Leiderdorp
www.loi.nl-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] Namens Charles Hedrick
Verzonden: dinsdag 24 augustus 2010 19:21
Aan: John Norman
CC: Sakai Dev List; Teaching & Learning Sakai Group
Onderwerp: Re: [Building Sakai] [DG: Teaching & Learning] Fwd: SCORM in Sakai

I don't have enough experience with SCORM to give a convincing opinion. I have two goals:

* providing something like a WebCT organizer page, for normal content. This needs to look like a part of Sakai, and not a frob. It also needs to integrate Sakai tools such as assignments in a way that would be hard from within SCORM. This will probably be the largest usage for Lesson Builder. It's certainly the most common gap identified by faculty, particularly since a lot of our faculty are used to eCollege setups where material is typically organized by week or by unit.

* handling training courses where we have requirements to verify that the student has done certain activities. I would hope that SCORM could do that. It seems to be their goal. My concern was pragmatic. From what I could find online, it didn't look like we'd be happy with the free implementations, and generally my users cam't deal with any tool that has a per-user charge. I'm also concerned about the lock-step approach typically taken by the instructional sequencers. Our tool is designed to be as open as possible consistent with making sure that people do what they have to. I really wasn't happy doing selective release at all, but we have situations where it seems to be required. I'm hoping it won't be used much outside that.

But if there were a good free SCORM player in Sakai I'd definitely install it and try it. It might well be the best approach for the second requirement. I think our tool will be justified just from the first requirement (although half the time in coding went into the second set of requirements -- if I could have concentrated just on the first one there are some additional things we could have done; unfortunately I only have the programmer for the summer.)

On Aug 24, 2010, at 11:09 AM, John Norman wrote:

> Warning: This is a personal impressionistic view of SCORM, but FWIW is the reason we are not investing in it:
> 1. For whatever reason, I believe there is a high frequency of SCORM content failure. Perhaps the standard is loose enough that different editors can produce different content that is not really compatible. SCORM vendors invest considerable time in troubleshooting nominally standard content that doesn't want to play nicely. So there is a significant maintenance burden to a SCORM player. Indeed our choice of Rustici is a reflection of the fact that you need a SCORM *content service* more than a SCORM player.
> 2. Admittedly, from our early experiences (Warwick Bailey of Icodeon used to work at CARET and built an early SCORM player here), the data it provides is not very useful and is generally hard to interpret. Many implementations just record student start and stop (or whatever the minimum requirement is). The amount of code for unused functionality and the content-fixing overhead are hard to justify for such simple functionality.
> 3. Finally, in our situation demand is very low. This means the Rustici service is very affordable for us ATM.
>
> So creating a SCORM player is not a 'build and move on' sort of project. It has a high maintenance burden and needs to be taken on by someone who cares enough to dedicate continuous effort to maintaining compatibility with what editors churn out. The good news is that things are probably slowly getting better due to the efforts of the good folks at Rustici and Icodeon and elsewhere. When debugging a content/player issue, they try to notify the editor creator of the issue so it can be fixed in editor updates and releases - but that is a long, slow haul.
>
> It is interesting to speculate whether such a content service could/should be part of a Sakai Foundation offering, or even a joint project with other open-source efforts. Certainly the integration to the remote SCORMCloud servers seems to work well. We may be misconceiving the problem that needs solving.
>
> John
>
> On 24 Aug 2010, at 15:41, Mathieu Plourde wrote:
>
>> Dear Sakaigers,
>>
>> This thread reflects what a lot of people think about SCORM in
>> Sakai... I'm not against vendors, in fact they are vital to the growth
>> of Sakai, but why do we have to rely on them to get it to work?
>>
>> Isn't there enough reasons or demand, especially when it comes to HR,
>> compliance, staff training, distance ed, to put the efforts to make it
>> work natively in Sakai? Or should we focus our energy on some other
>> testing/tracking/portable learning object standard (Dr. Chuck?)?
>>
>> Mathieu
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: Charles Hedrick <hedrick at rutgers.edu>
>> Date: Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 2:20 PM
>> Subject: Re: SCORM in Sakai
>> To: Mathieu Plourde <mathieu at udel.edu>
>> Cc: markjnorton at earthlink.net
>>
>>
>> The tool my student is doing will be able to do enough sequencing and
>> conditionals to serve our needs. I'm hoping to use something like
>> Captivate to prepare content, and then deploy it through this tool. It
>> will work, but won't be as flexible as SCORM. But, like everyone else,
>> I don't feel I can take on SCORM.
>> On Jul 13, 2010, at 2:16 PM, Mathieu Plourde wrote:
>>
>> Hi Charles,
>>
>> I totally agree. We're also just struggling with not having SCORM in
>> Sakai. It just seems like vendors have targeted the niche, and no one
>> wants to touch that one with a 10 foot pole anymore. SCORM is mostly a
>> corporate solution, and corporations don't mind paying a vendor to get
>> it done, so education is left behind.
>>
>> Mathieu
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 1:23 PM, Charles Hedrick <hedrick at rutgers.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> We have the same issue with HR wanting to do training. So do some of our continuous ed groups. I have a high school student writing a tool that will do the minimum that we need, but if I could, I'd probably prefer SCORM.
>>> On Jul 13, 2010, at 12:00 PM, Mathieu Plourde wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Charles,
>>>
>>> Not using Softchalk, not using any SCORM content anywhere on campus, nothing that I know of. HR wanted to do it with Articulate but backed-off because of the flakiness of the Sakai SCORM engine...
>>>
>>> They are now building their content in Articulate, publishing on the web without tracking, and are expecting to build quizzes in Sakai project sites to assess and track workers. Sucky workaround, but better than nothing.
>>>
>>> It just seems that every time SCORM comes around, we always think it's a requirement. And yet, when we look at the other things on our list, it always falls to the bottom.
>>>
>>> I'd love this to be fixed once and for all, but I can only complain...
>>>
>>> Mathieu
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Charles Hedrick <hedrick at rutgers.edu> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> So how are you using softchalk? I thought it needed scorm as a back end?
>>>>
>>>> On Jul 13, 2010, at 11:19 AM, Mark Norton wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Having worked with the UC Davis SCORM player, my opinion is that it isn't usable.  It sorta works, but that's not good enough.  I tried to provide support for this player for SoftChalk integration, but I had problems with manipulating packages in the Content Hosting Service.  It doesn't have gradebook integration, either. In the end, SoftChalk decided not to support this SCORM player.  We also looked at the other players:  Icodeon and Rustici.  In both cases, the per-student cost was prohibitive.
>>>>>
>>>>> Matthew recommended the Edia player, but Edia has only made some bug fixes to the David player.  The base code is the same.
>>>>>
>>>>> Sadly, unless you are willing to pay for a commercial player, there is no open source support for SCORM in Sakai.  Personally, I think it's fixable, but the time/money commitment to make it so is non-trivial.
>>>>>
>>>>> - Mark Norton
>>>>>
>>>>> Charles Hedrick wrote:
>>>>>> We're looking for something like SCORM. GIven who needs to use it, it could have a modest cost for a tool to prepare content, but we can't pay a per-student fee for delivery. Do either of you know what kind of shape the open-source Sakai SCORM code is in? The alternatives are confusing for an outsider. I'm looking for someone who can tell me that they actually use one of the implementations, and preferably tell me what editors they use it with -- unless compatibility is good enough that we can honestly say that it's safe to use any of them.
>>
>> =================================
>>
>> Mathieu Plourde, MBA
>> Project Leader, LMS/Instructional Designer
>> IT-Client Support & Services
>> mathieu at udel.edu
>> Office: 302-831-4060
>>
>> =================================
>>
>> TOP LINKS:
>>
>> Technology Troubleshooting: http://www.udel.edu/help
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